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A History of American Movies A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema Paul Monaco THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC Lanham • New York • Plymouth, UK 2010 Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Paul Monaco All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Monaco, Paul A history of American movies : a film-by-film look at the art, craft, and business of cinema / Paul Monaco p cm Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 978-0-8108-7433-6 (cloth : alk paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-7434-3 (pbk : alk paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-7439-8 (ebook) Motion pictures—California—Los Angeles—History—20th century Motion picture industry—United States—Los Angeles—History—20th century Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—History—20th century I Title PN1993.5.U65M55 2010 791.430973—dc22 2009051427 ϱ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America To my mother, Birdena O’Melia Monaco, who was born in 1916, and who, like the Hollywood movies, has grown since then and continues to flourish Contents Preface vii Part I: Classic Hollywood, 1927–1948 Establishing Hollywood Early Synchronous Sound Classic Hollywood Takes Form Banner Years Red, White, Blue, and Noir Postwar Triumphs and Reversals 23 43 59 83 97 10 11 Part II: Hollywood in Transition, 1949–1974 Postwar Unravelings Declining Audiences and Initial Responses Hollywood on the Ropes Indications of Revival Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 115 141 161 179 195 12 13 14 15 16 Part III: New Hollywood, 1975–2009 Origins of Hollywood Divided Mixed Styles, Mixed Messages Hollywood in the 1980s New Hollywood Enters the Digital Age Hollywood Enters the Twenty-First Century 217 233 245 273 313 v vi Contents Conclusion Selected Bibliography Index About the Author 335 339 341 349 Preface This book is for the reader who wants to understand one of the most im- portant cultural institutions of the twentieth century: the American cinema It is a history, but it is also a story And telling any story requires selectively choosing what to put in and what to leave out A History of American Movies chronicles an institution that had taken on its fundamental characteristics by the year 1927, when the introduction of synchronous sound in film put an abrupt end to the silent movies This story is about a professional community with its own ways of doing things, as well as a story about the relationships between the many talented people belonging to that community Cinema is simultaneously an art, a craft, and a business Art is best defined as a human-produced object, text, or performance with limited practical utility but with added dimensions of meaning and value open to interpretation A sunset may be beautiful and engage the viewer’s emotions, but it is not art Like a sculpture, a coat rack may be a standing form made of wood and metal—but it is not a sculpture, and is not considered art How art is regarded critically, and valued, is subject to complex development through cultural and social institutions, education, and the opinions of various experts Motion pictures are made by various people who specialize in each of the crafts that go into moviemaking, but always work collaboratively Among the major motion picture crafts are producing, screenwriting, directing, production management, cinematography, lighting, acting, production design, sound recording, sound mixing, and editing Hollywood professionals typically specialize in a single craft, although there is sometimes crossover of an individual from one craft to another Just how the collaboration of these various elements functions in the making of any particular movie is elusive It is widely recognized that making feature-length movies is collaborative Just how this vii viii Preface collaboration works, however, usually is ignored or glossed over in thinking and writing about what movies are and where they come from Finally, movies are a business, produced, distributed, and exhibited with the intention of covering the costs of the materials and personnel needed to make any individual movie, and with an eye to profitability That profitability is the margin that permits moviemaking and movie watching to continue A History of American Movies is a story told in recognition of the complexity of movies as an art, craft, and business It is written, first of all, for people who love movies and who would like to make them, especially for those younger men and women who see themselves as the filmmakers of the future At the same time, it is a book written for readers of any age who want to know what the American cinema is and truly has been, and how those strands of art, craft, and business were woven together complexly throughout Hollywood’s history The value of any Hollywood history depends on which movies are written about, with an explanation of how they were selected as being significant Mentioning the titles of a great many movies in encyclopedic fashion has value, but it is not the best way to tell the story of Hollywood Instead, this book focuses its attention on a select set of movies The movies selected are not choices of the author, however, nor of any other film critic or film scholar Instead, this history is based on the premise that the essence of Hollywood is best revealed through those movies whose titles are found on three lists that have been created primarily by professionals actually working in the movie industry The cinema of the United States has two “official” organizations The first is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, founded in 1927 by the leading motion picture production and distribution companies to promote film as an art and a science Very early in its history, the Academy instituted awards of merit to recognize accomplishment in a wide range of artistic and technical fields; the recipients of these awards receive statuettes known as “Oscars.” Forty years later, in 1967, the other official body, the American Film Institute (AFI), was founded with the specific goal of training filmmakers and preserving America’s film heritage With initial funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and the Ford Foundation, AFI’s broad mission is to enrich and nurture the art of film in America In addition to providing advanced graduate education in film production, AFI has created various forms of recognition to honor specific filmmakers and films Combined, the Academy and AFI provide us three lists of films recognized as exceptional Preface ix BEST PICTURE ACADEMY AWARDS The first of these lists consists of the movies selected for the Best Picture award by the Academy The Academy is the Hollywood establishment; its membership consists of people working in the motion picture industry above the line (studio executives, producers, screenwriters, actors) and craftspeople (production designers, actors, cinematographers, editors, sound recordists, sound mixers, art directors, etc.), as well as other creative, performing, and business personnel Since its earliest years in the late 1920s, when the Academy’s membership comprised just over four hundred, it has eventually grown into an organization with roughly six thousand voting members The Academy’s Best Picture Oscar winners for each year, beginning in 1927/28, have been selected by a cross-section of professionals actually engaged in finding, developing, and funding movie ideas, bringing them to the screen, and disseminating them to the public The Best Picture Academy Awards for each year are contemporary awards of distinction based exclusively on the evaluation and judgment of movie industry peers The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has selected a Best Picture for each year by vote since 1927/28 The awardee normally is selected from a list of five, or more, nominated films The winners through 2008 are: 1927/28: Wings 1928/29: The Broadway Melody 1929/30: Cimarron 1931/32: Grand Hotel 1932/33: Cavalcade 1934: It Happened One Night 1935: Mutiny on the Bounty 1936: The Great Ziegfeld 1937: The Life of Emile Zola 1938: You Can’t Take It with You 1939: Gone with the Wind 1940: Rebecca 1941: How Green Was My Valley 1942: Mrs Miniver 1943: Casablanca 1944: Going My Way 1945: The Lost Weekend 1946: The Best Years of Our Lives 1947: Gentleman’s Agreement 1948: Hamlet 1949: All the King’s Men 1950: All About Eve 1951: An American in Paris 1952: The Greatest Show on Earth 1953: From Here to Eternity 1954: On the Waterfront 1955: Marty 1956: Around the World in Eighty Days 1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai 1958: Gigi 1959: Ben-Hur 1960: The Apartment 1961: West Side Story 1962: Lawrence of Arabia 1963: Tom Jones 1964: My Fair Lady 1965: The Sound of Music 1966: A Man for All Seasons 200 Chapter 11 on good, evil, and free will that is as seductive as it is tasteless That Kubrick misjudged the distance between comedy and cruelty seems unarguable.” Like A Clockwork Orange, 1971’s The French Connection, directed by William Friedkin, was a mature and sophisticated work in the cinema of sensation It won the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1971 The film’s car chase in pursuit of a killer trying to escape on an elevated train careening on tracks above the street underscored the shock editing that built suspense throughout much of the movie Such techniques marked the maturation of an aesthetic developed over time during the 1960s that now found broad endorsement among filmmakers in the United States and their audiences By the early 1970s, movie audiences were on average younger than past moviegoers, consisting of late adolescents and young adults primarily, and skewed as a demographic toward being predominately male and disproportionately single Generically, The French Connection was an urban crime thriller with little uniqueness about either its characters or its plot Its hard-nosed protagonist, Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), was adept at bucking authority and using any means he could to track down a narcotics ring, even if his superiors didn’t approve of his methods The aesthetics of sensation in the violence of the movie and the pace of its editing, the edgy environment set in the deteriorating urban underbelly, and a certain rebelliousness blended into the personality of an otherwise lovable hero who used vigilante methods were signs of an emerging new formula for putting together a mass-appeal feature film that generated a great deal of positive attention from audiences, critics, and professionals within the industry Produced for the studio by Philip D’Antoni, The French Connection was a Twentieth Century-Fox release based on a best-selling book by Robin Moore, at least putatively laying claim to being nonfictional, which inspired a stylistic approach to the movie that the director Friedkin described as “induced documentary.” Friedkin himself had extensive experience as an awardwinning maker of television documentaries before becoming a director of feature motion pictures, but that likely had less to with the creative choices for The French Connection than the perceived notion in the movie industry at the time that a great many movies would appeal to audiences on the basis of an unrelenting commitment to a gritty urban realism The movie was shot on location in New York City during the winter The screen presentation of this kind of look to an urban environment dated back to the mid-1950s, with the most notable forerunner of the style being Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), but it was now being presented as an even grainier and more sordid evocation of the city in color cinematography than had been seen in Midnight Cowboy just two years earlier Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 201 Friedkin’s last feature completed before The French Connection had been The Boys in the Band, a 1970 love story about several homosexuals It failed badly at the box office, and, as Friedkin told an interviewer for the Hollywood Reporter, that failure made him realize that he was no longer interested in proselytizing on the screen Instead, for The French Connection he explained, “Before we had a script, we laid down a format that had a violent killing in the first two minutes, followed by an attempt to kill a cop, followed by another fifteen minutes of plot, followed by a surprise and an ambiguous twist That’s getting back to basics.” The basics to which Friedkin referred consisted of clearly connecting a film to its direct, emotional points of reference for the viewer In this instance, these connections entailed the aesthetic of sensation, the character types, and the milieu and story elements that were taken together by some observers to constitute a new approach to Hollywood moviemaking For a number of motion picture industry observers, the fact that The French Connection won the Academy’s Best Picture Oscar and that Friedkin was named Best Director by both the Academy and the Directors Guild of America verified that a fundamentally new kind of filmmaking was now being accepted at the very heart of the movie industry’s establishment THE LAST PICTURE SHOW The Last Picture Show (1971), directed by Peter Bogdanovich with a screenplay by Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry, explored another dimension of sophistication for Hollywood At a time when feature films were no longer made in black-and-white, this one was The review of it in the Hollywood Reporter called it “delicate, but monumental.” Applauding the decision to the film in black-and-white, William Wolf, writing in Cue, called Bogdanovich “a major American filmmaker,” applauding his “in-depth exploration of people and the environment.” The New Yorker trumpeted: “The Last Picture Show arrives just when it seemed time to announce that movies as pop culture were dead.” The film is a standard-bearer of a faded age, a real nostalgia piece It was also crafted in the manner of homage to some of Bogdanovich’s favorite film directors in recognition of a Hollywood past Bogdanovich had spent much of the prior decade writing monographs on film directors for the Museum of Modern Art, and then moved into filmmaking by working with legendary producer/director Roger Corman on his film The Wild Angels Cinematography on The Last Picture Show was by Robert Surtees, a veteran master of black-andwhite studio photography; the editor was Donn Cambern, and production design was by Polly Platt with art direction by Walter Scott Herndon The 202 Chapter 11 film was produced by BBS Productions/Columbia Pictures, with the executive producer for Columbia being Bert Schneider, who had been instrumental in the production of Easy Rider in 1969 For several members of the cast, the film marked career breakthroughs Jeff Bridges (Duane Jackson), Cybill Shepherd (Jacy Farrow, the high school beauty), Timothy Bottoms (Sonny Crawford), and Cloris Leachman (Ruth Popper, the wife of the high school sports coach who has fallen in love with Sonny) are each entirely convincing in a production designed to achieve great accuracy in its depiction of time and place In many ways, the film has elements of sexual intrigue and the disillusionment of growing, along with the portrayal of boredom and the peccadilloes of the local population, that became formulaic for depicting small-town America in film and on television during the final third of the twentieth century Nonetheless, the authenticity of this portrayal works especially well in Bogdanovich’s movie Jacy persuades Sonny to marry her, coaxing him away from his affair with the older Ruth but making sure her parents discover the young couple’s plans in time to pack her off to college before she and Sonny can go through with them Duane joins the Army and spends his last night in the town before embarking for Korea, where he and Sonny are together at the last motion picture showing in town at the local movie theater (Howard Hawks’s Red River) just before the theater closes for good Sonny, now running the local pool hall that had been willed to him, is at it when he sees the sympathetic Billy (Sam Bottoms) killed by a passing truck Sonny, in his loneliness, goes back to Ruth for consolation, where the film ends with them sitting mute, holding hands in her kitchen The Last Picture Show was filmed on location in Archer City, Texas The movie employed no original music, taking songs from the lists of 1951 and 1952 country-western and pop music charts found in Billboard and Cashbox instead As an artistic choice, this was an effective approach, and the soundtrack lent itself well to the movie, but as a business decision, it was more problematic The video release of The Last Picture Show was delayed until 1991 because the music rights had been cleared for theatrical screenings in 1972 but not for broadcast or ancillary video distribution Stephen Kanter wrote in Time that Bogdanovich had made ennui fascinating, calling him “the most exciting new director in America today.” Judith Crist, in New York magazine, anointed it the best picture of the year, introducing a large group of young, new talent to the screen Of the major national movie critics, only Stanley Kauffmann, writing in the New Republic, was unkind: “It all seems true enough, but almost every scene reminds us vaguely of something we’ve seen before and generally have seen better.” Winfred Blevins of the Los Angeles Times called it “stunning, vivid,” while in the Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 203 New York Times, critic Vincent Canby declared the movie “lovely.” Stephen Farber, however, writing in the New York Times at the beginning of the following year, called it overrated The Last Picture Show garnered eight Academy Award nominations and won two Oscars Ben Johnson (for his role as Sam the Lion) won for Best Supporting Actor, and Leachman for Best Supporting Actress Columbia Pictures subsequently produced a sequel to The Last Picture Show in 1990 called Texasville, an $18 million project that failed at the box office; according to Bogdanovich, this failure was caused by the film’s inappropriately wide release COPPOLA’S JEWEL Prior to his publication of The Godfather, Mario Puzo had written two other novels, Dark Arena (1955) and The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), both of which were considered more “literary” than his best-seller success that sold 500,000 in hardcover and over 10 million copies in paperback Paramount had negotiated rights for a film adaptation of The Godfather in 1967 even before Puzo began to write it Its release as a film, then, came swiftly after its release as a book The studio is said to have considered several different possibilities for its direction Industry insiders believe that Otto Preminger was first asked to direct it, but declined, ostensibly because Frank Sinatra could not be secured for a leading role As the legendary producer Robert Evans, who had risen to a position of creative power as the executive vice president of Paramount in 1969, is reported to have decided, however, the film needed an ItalianAmerican as its director The selection of Francis Ford Coppola for that role, however, was a gamble, because his track record did not necessarily establish him as a proven candidate to undertake the direction of such an ambitious project with a large cast and complex art direction Well established as a screenwriter and having won a screenwriting Oscar for Patton, Coppola’s directing credentials were far less impressive: You’re a Big Boy Now (1967) was a modest success, while Finian’s Rainbow (1968) and The Rain People (1969) were box office failures Additionally, the Hollywood rumor mill had it that Coppola himself was reluctant to direct The Godfather because he considered Puzo’s popular novel to be an inferior piece of writing For a considerable period of its development, then, The Godfather appears to have been a movie that practically no one in Hollywood really wanted to make And, even after Coppola was signed on to direct it, Paramount executives appeared to be jittery and were reported to want to 204 Chapter 11 dismiss the thirty-two-year-old as director in favor of the legendary and seasoned Elia Kazan just as filming was to begin Even once into production, the movie was far from a guaranteed winner at the box office In addition to the comparative youth and unproven directorial record of Coppola, Marlon Brando was considered by many observers to be a has-been who was well past his prime, and Al Pacino, who, as Michael Corleone, truly emerges as the primary figure in the film, was an unknown to screen audiences Moreover, up until 1972, movies about the Mafia or organized crime had not achieved any particular success for Hollywood at the box office The accomplishments of the completed film, of course, promptly threw whatever concerns had haunted its development out the window The Godfather reinvented the gangster film as a genre, and, in so doing, was a roaring commercial success, becoming the first movie ever to earn more than $100 million in its initial release Puzo and Coppola collaborated on the screenplay, which probably benefited from the fact that neither of them actually knew very much about the Mafia So, while a number of the incidents in the movie appear to be based on well-known struggles within the New York City mob during the two decades following World War II, the script focuses instead on family dynamics and on character It was this emphasis that induced veteran movie critic Charles Champlin to call it “the fastest three-hour movie in history.” Throughout the movie, The Godfather goes back and forth between its action sequences and its family saga Nowhere is this more striking than in the cross-cutting sequence between Michael Corleone standing as godfather to his sister’s baby at its baptism while his henchmen annihilate his enemies from the other Mafia families This memorable sequence, delivered so engagingly through the device of parallel editing—cutting back and forth between different scenes to portray action appearing to occur at the same time—encapsulates the essence of what makes The Godfather such a compelling movie From the beginning, critical response to The Godfather was positive, with much of the commentary recognizing that it would claim an important place in cinema history even at the time of its initial release One of the very few negative voices came from A D Murphy’s review in the industry’s leading trade journal, Variety Noting only “flashes of excitement,” Murphy called The Godfather overlong and occasionally confusing He wrote, “While never so placid as to be boring, it is never so gripping as to be superior screen drama.” By contrast, Vincent Canby in the New York Times called the movie “the year’s first really satisfying big commercial American film.” Time and Newsweek both agreed, and each recognized its mainstream importance by devoting laudatory multipage spreads to it upon its initial release Pauline Kael’s review in the New Yorker praised it as a shining example of the premise that the best Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 205 movies come from some merger of commerce and art, with The Godfather being a stellar example of this hypothesis Produced by Albert S Ruddy, The Godfather displayed stellar cinematography by its director of photography Gordon Willis Nearly 90 percent of the film was shot at locations in New York City or its immediate environs This was one instance in which the viewer could clearly see the significance of the Hollywood production values and the polished overall look of the movie Its reputation has persevered On the American Film Institute’s 2006 list of the hundred greatest American films, it stands at second only behind Citizen Kane MONEY MAKES THE WORLD— AND HOLLYWOOD—GO ’ROUND Beaten out for the Academy’s Best Picture Oscar in 1972 by The Godfather, the musical Cabaret nonetheless captured eight Oscars that year: Bob Fosse for Best Director; Joel Gray, Best Supporting Actor; Liza Minnelli, Best Actress; Rolf Zehetbauer and Jurgen Kiebach for Art Direction; Herbert Strabel for Set Direction; Geoffrey Unsworth for Cinematography; David Bretherton for editing; Ralph Burns for Music Scoring, Adaptation, and Original Song Score; Robert Knudson and David Hildyard for Sound Originally based on British author Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 memoir Goodbye to Berlin, the material had been adapted into a stage play in 1951 entitled I Am a Camera, with a subsequent feature film version (produced in Great Britain in 1955) by the same name In 1966, the property opened on Broadway as a stage musical with the title Cabaret Subsequently, Allied Artists bought the film rights to the stage musical and developed the property as a movie, with ABC Pictures as a producing partner Producer Cy Feuer eventually put together Jay Presson Allen as the screenwriter, the legendary Fosse as director, and star Minnelli (the daughter of the director of famed musical films at MGM Vincente Minnelli and the celebrated screen star Judy Garland) At the very outset, Feuer and Fosse agreed that all the songs in the production should be sung in a natural context, which meant that characters would not simply break out abruptly into song as had become standard in many movie musicals This seemingly simple decision marked a turning point for the motion picture musical, marking a distinct change in style for future film musicals as compared to Hollywood’s traditional ones Hence, nearly all the songs in Cabaret act as political, social, or sexual metaphors for the characters and their dangerous—and decidedly decadent—milieu The aesthetic of the entire movie is meant to blend with this basic idea Bretherton’s editing serves so well, for example, by cross-cutting from the 206 Chapter 11 songs being sung inside the club to images outside—a man being beaten to death by Nazi street thugs, leading character Sally Bowles’s (Liza Minnelli) postcoital bliss in the splendor of her boudoir, and so on To many commentators, it was this editing that gave the film its strong satirical bite and enabled Cabaret to use of its music so effectively as ironic commentary on Berlin shortly before Hitler’s rise to power Even before the movie went into production, it was known in Hollywood circles that Hugh Wheeler had done extensive rewrites on the screenplay and added new scenes Nevertheless, Allen retained full credit as the sole author of the screenplay; Wheeler is credited on Cabaret only as a research consultant In the adaptation for the screen, several songs from the Broadway version of the musical were dropped entirely Fred Ebb wrote the lyrics for three new songs, each of which may be considered among the film’s most memorable: “Mein Herr,” “Money, Money,” and “Maybe This Time.” For authenticity, Fosse had the cabaret’s “Kit Kat” dancers gain weight and allow the hair to grow under their arms The interiors for the movie were filmed at the Bavaria Studios in Munich, the exteriors on the streets of West Berlin Feuer called the picture’s $3 million budget “a tight collar.” Fosse wanted a look from his cinematographer, Unsworth, that was reminiscent of German Expressionist paintings of the 1920s and early 1930s It is reported that Vincente Minnelli attended the first screening of the film in Los Angeles and, after it, walked up to Fosse and said, “I have just seen the perfect movie.” COPPOLA AS PRODUCER The success of The Godfather both at the box office and with critics catapulted Francis Ford Coppola onto the Hollywood A-list of directors Coppola, however, had greater ambitions, and his role in the American cinema immediately became much larger For one thing, he was the first of the “movie brats”— young men who graduated with M.F.A degrees in film in the mid- to late 1960s—to achieve prominence as a director A graduate of UCLA, Coppola came to the Hollywood movie industry on the basis of an advanced education in the craft of filmmaking, as well as a background in the formal study of film history and criticism Two other movie brats of this generation were George Lucas, a graduate of the University of Southern California, and Martin Scorsese, who earned his M.F.A in film from New York University Taken together, these three were something new for the movie industry In previous generations, personnel drawn to Hollywood had nearly always found some kind of entry-level position at a studio and then worked their way up to positions of creative and craft Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 207 responsibility Instead, the movie brats were educated at major universities for their filmmaking careers Older professionals in the movie industry who had worked their way up in traditional ways might consider them “brats,” a term that was intended to point out not only their youth but also their presumed arrogance, but few could deny the thoroughness of their preparation and their commitment to moviemaking as a calling Each of these three was to have a significant impact on Hollywood in the last third of the twentieth century, although each would make his impact in a different way Coppola envisioned himself as a producer as well as a director He founded his own studio, Omni Zoetrope, and took on a series of movies that he personally marshaled through from development to the screen The first of these, American Graffiti (1973), produced by Coppola and written and directed by Lucas, became one of the most successful films of the era It was a lowbudget movie with personal points of reference that seemed autobiographical, and it featured a cast of newcomers: Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul LeMat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, and Harrison Ford Lucas had grown up in Modesto, California, and American Graffiti was set in 1962 in a similar place Variety called it an “outstanding evocation of ’50s teenagers, told with humor and heart Strong outlook.” It continued: “Of all the youth-themed nostalgia films in the past couple of years, George Lucas’ American Graffiti is among the very best.” Lucas wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck and set it against a chrome and neon of one long summer night in the lives of four high school friends Shooting was scheduled for twenty-seven days in Petaluma, California Karin Green served as music coordinator for the film, as Walter Murch’s soundtrack uses roughly forty rock-and-roll hits from the period The budget for the film was $750,000, and the music synchronization rights needed for the use of classic copyrighted rock-and-roll songs in the soundtrack alone roughly equaled the costs of the production itself Studio executives were cautious about its release, but Universal did a number of “pickup” test screenings of American Graffiti, and word soon filtered back to the executives at Universal that these test audiences loved the movie AN INDUSTRY ADJUSTS American Graffiti was a very significant movie because it showed the Hollywood studios that films connecting closely to the stories of typical teenagers, even without known stars but buttressed by music that was popular with adolescents and young adults, could be very successful at the box office The movie sent a message to the studios, namely, that this was one kind of film that could 208 Chapter 11 appeal to a changing audience for movies that the motion picture industry did not yet fully understand Nonetheless, that message was received in the midst of a complex and changing cultural environment Who the audience was and what movies to make for that audience had been the key questions at the heart of Hollywood’s existence since World War I Hollywood was now confronted with the perceived social changes of the late 1960s, the sense that there was now a distinct youth culture that had not existed before, and the attempt to grasp just how widespread and important the counterculture was The era was a tumultuous one for American movies, but also, in the view of many observers, an especially rich and creative era By 1971, each of the major Hollywood studios had been bought and taken over by a different conglomerate corporation except Columbia Pictures But conglomerate control did not mean the same thing in every case Warner Bros seemed to be at one end of the spectrum, with conglomerate control meaning tight management and a bottom-line approach to movie projects from an aloof business perspective By contrast, at Paramount, Gulf and Western’s CEO, Harry Bluhdorn, had chosen the young Robert Evans as head of production, and Evans was like an old Hollywood mogul of the early Classic Era: he had a strong sense of cinema art, he sought out and nurtured unconventional talent for major creative projects, and he produced comparatively edgy movies that were considered high risk, from Rosemary’s Baby to The Godfather to Chinatown A period of tumult in the movie industry saw unusual and unexpected movies reach the theaters There was a turnover in craft talent, especially among directors, giving a chance to many newcomers who likely would not have gotten opportunities to work on feature films in earlier eras Right alongside this environment, the revisiting of tried-and-true Hollywood methods and formulas continued, as well A FORMULA FILM Increasingly, the Hollywood business welcomed new entrepreneurs who put together funding and packaged new feature-film productions in different ways Frequently, such movies received funding from many different sources, some of them traditional and some not—from bank loans or other credit, as well as from people in nearly all walks of life who were seeking tax shelters and an opportunity to brush up against celebrities and a glamorous industry The conversion into movie-producing often was led by agents, a profession that knew the talent, the craftspeople, executives at the studios, or the founders of new distribution companies Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 209 In 1973, Universal backed a movie produced by Tony Bill; Michael Phillips, a former actor; and his wife, Julia Phillips, who had been an editor at Ladies’ Home Journal They teamed to package a film entitled The Sting, with a cast that mirrored the 1969 hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford and directed by George Roy Hill, it was similar to Butch Cassidy in that it was about a couple of likable men and their capers There is little doubt that bringing Newman, Redford, and Hill together produced a combination that establishment Hollywood, still floundering to recover its equilibrium in the changing culture, liked Bankrolled by Universal, the movie enlisted one of the great veterans of Hollywood cinematography, Robert Surtees, as its director of photography and hired the legendary Henry Bumstead as its art director Among its successful elements, the movie, set in Chicago during the 1930s, reintroduced to the broad American public the ragtime music of Scott Joplin, with the adapted score from his music earning one of the movie’s seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture for 1973 In The Sting, an elderly man named Luther Coleman (Robert Earl Jones) and his younger buddy Johnny Hooker (Redford) pull off a successful con, giving the pair enough money to convince Coleman it’s enough to retire on, while stimulating the insatiable Hooker to hurry on to his next job, which will be even bigger But before either Coleman or Hooker can move on, reality intervenes It turns out that their mark for the last was a numbers runner for an underworld organization run by gangster Doyle Lonnegan (played, perhaps a bit improbably, by the distinguished British actor Robert Shaw), who orders Coleman’s murder Hooker, wanting to find Coleman’s killer, seeks out an older friend of Coleman’s, Henry Gondorff (Newman), whom he discovers in a dissipated state hiding out in a bordello run by a tough madam named Billie (Eileen Brennan) So their partnership begins, and a complicated array of ins and outs follows, as they set up a “store” for off-track betting and Hooker repeatedly eludes the killers who have killed off Coleman and are now after him Before they can find him, however, Hooker gets to Lonnegan and convinces him to place a huge bet of half a million dollars with Gondorff at their store But even though they are pals, Gondorff worries that his friend Hooker won’t keep his wits about him and won’t be able to pull off the “sting” successfully The movie fared much better with the Hollywood establishment and with audiences than it did with the critics The trade journal Hollywood Reporter concluded its mixed review of The Sting by saying that the movie looked a lot better than it felt In spite of the stylized cinematographic affectations— dissolves, fades, wipes, the use of glass shots, and even titles—that were so impressive, something essential seemed missing in it The script, which won a Best 210 Chapter 11 Screenplay Oscar for its author David S Ward, nonetheless was perceived by many critics as being too complicated structurally and too heavy with dialogue Writing in the New York Times, Vincent Canby said the movie reminded him of a musical comedy with the songs removed! Jay Cocks, reviewing The Sting in Time, offered that it was essentially an elaborate gimmick film that “ends with a lot of expensive sets and a screen full of blue eyes.” FORGET IT, JAKE An entirely different critical response awaited Paramount’s 1974 production of Chinatown The producer, Robert Evans, teamed with screenwriter Robert Towne (who won an Oscar for the screenplay) on this notably edgy and stylized addition to the genre of modern film noir Chinatown starred Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, with John Huston, John Hillerman, Darrell Zwerling, Diane Ladd, and Perry Lopez and was directed by Roman Polanski Art direction was the creation of Richard Sylbert and W Stewart Campbell with sets by Ruby Levitt and costumes by Anthea Sylbert The director of photography was John A Alonzo As Evelyn Mulwray, who asks private detective J J Gittes (Nicholson) to find her husband’s murderer, Dunaway delivers a vintage noir performance, complemented by Alonzo’s dark, muted cinematography and Jerry Goldsmith’s lush romantic score Towne originally wanted to direct the movie himself, but he was broke at the time and cut a deal with Evans on a thirty-day option on his screenplay at Paramount; Evans promptly hired Polanski to direct Polanski, Alonzo, and the art director collaborated to create a Los Angeles of the 1930s that consists of a dry, parched landscape covering a sordid pool of corruption, vice, and incest One neighborhood of the city, Chinatown, where the movie’s plot finally ends and a villain triumphs, becomes a metaphor for a moral climate of such Byzantine corruption that no man can fathom it What seems a simple case of a husband having a romantic affair abruptly explodes into murder and scandal, and, by the minute, the story becomes more mysterious, complex, and downright kinky Gittes is a private eye whose sleepy gaze unravels, in Chinese-box fashion, layers of private depravity behind a public-works scam involving gentleman farmer Noah Cross (John Huston) and his skittish daughter Evelyn Mulwray Critic Jerry Hiller wrote in 1974: A film about Los Angeles in the thirties by a Polish director looking through a CinemaScope lens in 1974 seems an anachronistic mixture But on its visual terms alone, Chinatown displays one of the most stylistically Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 211 cohesive uses of the ’Scope format to date It might be seen as the artistic vindication of CinemaScope The superb camerawork, and, more surprisingly, the editing [by Sam O’Steen]—a feature which is considered incompatible with the large screen—combine so powerfully that one wonders if CinemaScope didn’t die too soon Time’s critic Jay Cocks gave it a mixed review, concluding: Chinatown as a whole shares something of Dunaway’s problem Get too close to it and the careful illusion breaks down Polanski and Towne turned out a smart and elegant creation But the script also raises moral questions and political implications that are never plumbed at greater than paper-cup depth Seen by many as being as searing and as resonant a story as the movies have ever told about the making of modern America, New York Times critic Jim Shepard called it “jolting noir with a shot of nihilism” in a 1999 article on the movie and its interpretation A SEQUEL TO DIE FOR The Godfather, Part II holds the distinction of being the only sequel honored on both of the American Film Institute’s lists of the 100 greatest films The original Godfather in 1972 won the Best Picture Oscar and two other Academy Awards—Best Director for Francis Ford Coppola and Best Actor for Marlon Brando—and was the all-time box office hit for Hollywood until 1978 The 1974 sequel won twice as many Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Robert De Niro), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Dramatic Music Score, and Best Art Direction and Set Direction Critics, as well as the Hollywood establishment, were impressed by the accomplishments of this sequel, the success of which remains unrivaled in American cinema history Coppola’s undertaking for this follow-up to the enormously popular first Godfather film expands the saga of the Corleone family in a screenplay that interweaves almost three generations of births, deaths, marriages, baptisms, communions, deep friendships, and betrayals In research for the screenplay, Coppola enlisted Debbie Fine, a photographic and story researcher at Paramount Studios, to annotate, verify, investigate, and structure the credible lineage of the family and its story With this ambitious work, Coppola anchored his Hollywood reputation as a stickler for details and Al Pacino established himself as an A-list movie actor Pacino, who had studied at the 212 Chapter 11 Actors Studio, recommended Lee Strasberg, one of its founders, to Coppola for the role of Hyman Roth Given the success of The Godfather, Coppola was in the driver’s seat for this sequel Ambitious and visionary, Coppola got his own company to be listed with Paramount as a coproducer of the film As a director, he came with an original idea to build the sequel around a story line and characters so that the two movies eventually could be shown together The changing Hollywood was reflected by the movie taking eight months for production and its budget soaring from an initial $6 million to more than $11 million By the time of its release, however, Paramount already had recorded advance bookings worth more than $26 million in earnings from just the first 340 theaters where the movie opened at Christmastime in 1974 With a plot constantly shifting from Sicily to Ellis Island to Las Vegas to Lake Tahoe to Havana, and across periods, The Godfather, Part II is not really a gangster film, but rather a family saga played out against a backdrop of a considerable swath of American history from early in the twentieth century into the 1960s A review in the magazine Time Out from London described much of the shared wisdom about The Godfather, Part II: Where the film really constitutes an advance is in its analysis of crime, violence, and control As a result, the film is not only more psychologically complex than the original, but is far more critical of Mafia methods, and is considered far more politically astute as a reflection on the economic and moral development of twentieth-century America It’s also, of course, about loyalty and betrayal, hope and disenchantment, time and memory Wrote fellow “movie brat” director Martin Scorsese in deep admiration of The Godfather, Part II: I admire the ambition of the project, its Shakespearean breadth, its tragic melancholy in its portrayal of the dissolution of the American dream I admire its use of parallel editing to accentuate the paradoxes of the historical analysis, Gordon Willis’s dark-hued photography, the actors’ performances, the accuracy of its period reconstructions Michael Corleone rules his empire from his fortress-like Lake Tahoe estate Unlike the gangsters of the Hollywood movies of the thirties, he doesn’t die but lives on—which seems to be an even greater punishment The movie was long in length, coming in at three hours and twenty minutes The screen time, however, never seems to drag This is a function of the screenwriting and the editing, but also of the acting performances Robert De Niro, who almost played Don Corleone’s turncoat chauffeur in The Godfather, was chosen to play the don as a young man struggling for survival on the Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 213 Lower East Side of New York City early in the twentieth century De Niro took a Best Actor Oscar for his haunting portrayal of the young Vito Corleone The supporting roles all seemed as strong: Diane Keaton as Michael’s wife, John Cazale as his brother Fredo, and Talia Shire (director Coppola’s sister) as his sister Connie, and even the role of Frank Pentangeli (“Frankie Five-Angels”), which was taken by Michael V Gazzo, a playwright; Senator Geary was played by G D Spradlin, a former lawyer and oilman who had once run for mayor of Oklahoma City Although The Godfather, Part II was far less successful commercially than The Godfather two years earlier, earning about $31 million (roughly half the earnings of the 1972 movie), against a $13 million investment in production costs, it marked the pinnacle of Coppola’s success and influence in Hollywood The 1974 movie was widely applauded by critics for its ambition, complexity, and vast accomplishment and was readily acknowledged by professionals within the industry After The Godfather, Part II, Coppola’s career and presence in Hollywood would be more tempestuous and problematic Of the other two original movie brats, George Lucas was now poised to conquer Hollywood with Star Wars, which he turned into its own franchise, before going on to launch Industrial Light and Magic Scorsese, who would maintain a certain distance from the Hollywood establishment, was still, by the twentieth century’s end, considered to have survived to become the most wide-ranging and accomplished director of the trio SUMMARY The conglomerate takeovers of major Hollywood studios in the late 1960s provided the basis for the motion picture industry’s future financial stability During the early 1970s, Hollywood moviemaking elaborated on the new directions of the late 1960s The cinema of sensation matured New talents found opportunity in Hollywood The first of the “movie brats,” graduates of M.F.A programs in film, made their mark in Hollywood The most prominent person in this first wave of movie brats was Francis Ford Coppola, who became a dominant Hollywood figure in the period As the screenwriter for Patton, the cowriter and director of The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II, and producer of American Graffiti, Coppola excelled in influencing an entire industry His Godfather II holds a special spot in cinema history as an admirable and critically acclaimed sequel Producer Robert Evans, screenwriter Robert Towne, and director Roman Polanski joined forces on Chinatown in 1974 The film’s accomplishments pointed toward many of the challenges to genre conventions that would characterize Hollywood during the final quarter of the twentieth century ... treated as being of equal value and importance 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Citizen Kane (19 41) The Godfather (19 72) Casablanca (19 42) Raging Bull (19 80) Singin’ in the Rain (19 52)... Monaco, Paul A history of American movies : a film-by-film look at the art, craft, and business of cinema / Paul Monaco p cm Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 97 8-0 - 810 8-7 43 3-6 (cloth... Postwar Unravelings Declining Audiences and Initial Responses Hollywood on the Ropes Indications of Revival Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 11 5 14 1 16 1 17 9 19 5 12 13 14 15 16 Part